The Latehomecomer

By Kao Kalia Yang
274 pp. Coffee House Books, 2008 $14.95

Reviewed by Michelle Theriault

The Hmong believe that before babies are born they live in the sky, where they are able to look down on the life of the world. They choose their families, and in doing so, choose the people they are to become. Kao Kalia Yang’s memoir The Latehomecomer is the story of her family. It begins in the late 1970s, when she still lived in the sky, a spirit without an earthly body. At the time, her parents lived in the hills of Laos, where the Hmong people had resided for centuries after being driven out of China. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, they were hunted and brutalized as U.S. collaborators. So they crossed rivers to escape, with precious treasures tied tightly to their chests: ceremonial silver treasures and, more importantly, babies. Kao Kalia Yang leaves the sky and joins her parents in 1980, as they are settling in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand.

From there, Yang, who now owns a business helping the Hmong community with writing and translation services, chronicles her family’s collective journey as Hmong refugees – in the Thai camps, and later in Minnesota, where the family is resettled. She writes of her first night in America, sleeping on the tiled floor of her relatives’ house, and breathing the scent of her new homeland: Head and Shoulders shampoo. In the United States, the Yang family ekes out a living in St. Paul, Minnesota – Kao Kalia and her eldest sister acting as shy translators for their parents, who struggle to learn English and make ends meet with work at a coolant factory. They live in houses where moss blooms on the walls, and every new baby joining them from the sky makes it harder to survive.

Yang’s story feels both familiar and revelatory. Maybe it is familiar because the narrative of immigrant struggle and sacrifice to raise a family in America is woven so deeply into our collective consciousness. Yang’s story is not a trauma memoir or a particularly searching exploration of immigrant identity. More than anything, it is an elegy to her late grandmother, a shaman who never learned to write – the kind of book you write not as much for fame and fortune as for the gift of putting your family’s experience on paper, to last forever. The revelation of this story of a family’s migration is both in Yang’s gorgeously spare prose and in the heft of her words. As recently as the 1950s, the Hmong had no written language. Kao Kalia Yang writes of “slowly unleashing a flood of Hmong into language, seeking refuge not for a name or a gender, but a people.” This granddaughter of a generation that preserved its stories orally has written a book that seems to capture the essence of what it means to be Hmong in America today.